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West Africa: Boosting Yam Production, April 2012

Yam tubers. Some can be as small as a fist, others as tall as a man. The Yam Improvement for Income and Food Security in West Africa (YIIFSWA) project, which is supported by a U.S.$12 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in collaboration with the governments of Ghana and Nigeria, the UKs Natural Resources Institute, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and Catholic Relief Services. The project will focus on increasing yields through better seed tuber supply, and improving markets for this underground, edible tuber.

Credit: IITA

Woman selling dried yam tubers used to prepare a local meal (amala) in southwest Nigeria. Yams are deeply tied to the lives, livelihoods and cultures in West Africa and among Africans in diasporas, yet their fate hangs in the balance as a variety of pests and diseases have now depressed yields to a mere 14 percent of potential harvests.

Credit: Jeff Haskins/Burness Communications

A healthy yam field. Today, yam production is under assault from fungal diseases, such as anthracnose that literally turns a field black, along with the yam beetle, nematodes, plant viruses, declining soil fertility and stresses caused by climate change. Post-harvest diseases such as tuber rot can by themselves claim up to 40 percent of a crop. The cost of seed tubers is one-third of the total cost of producing ware tubers for food. Seed tubers claim about 30 percent of the annual harvest.

Credit: IITA

Farmer receives improved seed yams. IITA has developed new varieties that yield 50 to 100 percent more than existing varieties. Among these improved yam varieties, 19 were officially released in Nigeria and are yet to be massively multiplied for distribution to growers. Farmers in southern Nigeria, who like others in the region celebrate yams with elaborate and colorful annual festivals, have dubbed one of these varieties the wonder yam due to its resistance to yam mosaic virus and yam badnavirus. IITA hosts the worlds largest collection of yam varieties.

Credit: Jeff Haskins/Burness Communications

Yam celebrations in Nigeria. So revered is the yam cropNigerian novelist Chinua Achebe calls it the king of cropsthat in Cote dIvoire, funerals and burials are sometimes postponed until after the local yam festival has been observed. Even trans-Atlantic slavers spoke of the importance of provisioning their slave vessels with large quantities of yams for the voyage to the New World because of their much longer storage than most other fresh root crops. Actually, there is no relation to the sweet potato that Americans call yams, and the dryer, grainier true yam.

Credit: IITA

Women buying and selling yams in Ghana. Research shows that 66 to 97 percent of households desire to eat yams on a weekly basis. Yet, according to IITA, the domestic price of yams is well above the reach of many such consumers, whose low income make them only able to afford to buy slices rather than whole tubers.

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